UC Berkeley Press Release

BERKELEY — Watching
nearly 900 human-powered movable type blocks depict
the character for "harmony," or 2,000 drummers
pound out synchronized thunder, can leave one with
the impression of one mass nation indivisible.
But Olympian showmanship aside, China, as a unitary
entity, hardly exists, journalist James Fallows told
an audience at UC Berkeley Sept. 25. With more than
a billion people of dozens of ethnicities (whose
most striking shared quality is an aversion to following
rules, he said), China is an "even
more fractured society than the United States. We
should speak of 'China' only sparingly."

With that proviso, the Atlantic Monthly foreign
correspondent, serving as the campus's 2008 Sanford
S. Elberg Lecturer in International Studies, depicted
a nation of outsized contradictions: strong and fragile,
modern and backwards, authoritarian and liberal,
frightfully polluted and "pushing
in some ways harder" than the U.S. to address
its profound environmental issues. China's strength
and modernity — symbolized by the architectural
wonders of the Beijing Olympics and feared by many
in the West — are, at present, "real but
thin," he said. Its industrial might is based
almost entirely on manufacturing and construction.
And its dazzling, "high-end" design and
construction achievements of the past decade are
not buttressed, as are America's most flashy building
projects, by "a
thousand other layers of infrastructure" created
over several centuries.

China's contemporary environmental crisis is its
most profound challenge, in Fallows' view. Its air
pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions are legendary.
But its modest advancements and ongoing internal
struggles on the environmental front are less known,
and merit the attention of the world, he said. (For
more on this theme, see his article, "China's
Silver Lining," in
the June 2008 issue of The Atlantic.) "It
is in China," he said, "that the world's
environmental battles will be won or lost."

"The Chinese national government has been able to concentrate
on the real problems of the nation most of the time. The U.S.
is not willing to accept the entire political bargain that
entails" — but
its own house is not in pristine order either. If the 2008 U.S. presidential
election "becomes mainly about lipstick on a pig" or whether
"some candidate is a Muslim, that would argue against our vitality
as a self-governing system" as well.

— James Fallows

The Chinese people have increasing freedom to raise
environmental concerns and assert workers' rights,
Fallows said. But the government continues to have
zero tolerance for press freedom, and a tin ear for
how many of its official pronouncements are perceived
by foreigners. "I often wonder if writers for The
Onion are moonlighting" in Chinese officialdom,
he quipped. Whenever a bureaucrat chooses to refer
to the 14th Dalai Lama "as 'a jackal in monk's
robes,' I don't know if this advances the PR cause
of the Chinese government."

Based on his interviews with Chinese military officials,
Fallows discounted the idea that China represents
a military threat to the U.S. anytime in the foreseeable
future. A longtime Asia observer who has spent the
past two years in Beijing (and has written a new
book, Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports
from China, to be published in January), he
acknowledged that the rise of the Chinese manufacturing
sector has contributed to the erosion of high-wage
U.S. factory jobs. At the same time, he said, China's
financial investments in the U.S. have allowed Americans
to live with more while the Chinese people have done
with less. China need not pose a serious economic
threat to the United States, he asserted, "unless
the U.S. mismanages the relationship."

Which brings one, in the final weeks of a presidential
campaign, to the inevitable question: if
the American people were to cast their ballots based
on U.S.-China
policy, whom should they elect? Fallows' surprising
response: George W. Bush. More than in virtually
any other area of foreign policy, he proposed, the
Bush administration has struck a reasonable balance — speaking
up about its differences with China, he said, while
recognizing China as "a place we have to deal
with…. My watchword for the next administration:
eight more years, and then 20 more after that."